Users will be able to see if they're overexerting a muscle, say, or using improper form. Image: Athos

One big challenge was making the tech disappear. The founders wanted to avoid clothes that felt like they had electronics inside them--the "electric blanket" effect. Image: Athos

The first products are slated to ship next summer. Image: Athos

Regardless of whether or not you’ve got a gym membership, there’s a decent chance that, somewhere in the folds of your brain, you’ve got a vivid picture of the sensor-laden, whiz-bang workout of the future. Here of course I’m referring to the indelible image of Ivan Drago, the Soviet super-boxer, strapped with electrodes in the training montage from Rocky IV.

It’s hard to deny the allure of a computer-optimized bod.

In that movie, Drago’s machine-assisted regimen is the counterpoint to our hero’s homespun preparation of lifting logs and jumping rope, and yet, allegiances aside, it’s hard to deny the allure of a computer-optimized bod. That’s exactly what a startup called Athos hopes to deliver–not with a lab full of machinery but with Under Armor-style workout gear, invisibly embedded with muscle-tracking sensors.

Athos is the brainchild of Dhananja Jayalath and Christopher Wiebe, conceived when the two were students at the University of Waterloo in Canada. Like many college students, they found themselves eager to bulk up; also like many college students, neither could afford a personal trainer. As electrical engineers, the predicament posed a compelling challenge: Was it possible to replace that human touch with technology?

The problem, they quickly found, is that personal trainers require personal presence. They’re effective because they have data: they can see whether or not you’re using the correct form; they can tell whether you’re over- or under-exerting yourself. “They’re not just being prescriptive,” Jayalath says. “They look at what you’re doing.”

To glean that same data, the students turned to electromyography, or EMG–a technology that tracks muscle activity using the same type of adhesive sensors you saw strapped to Drago. Typically, EMG is used by doctors, physical therapists, and professional athletes. Jayalath and Wiebe have spent the last several years figuring out how to make the tech useful for the average person, and how to incorporate it into something they wouldn’t be mortified to wear to the gym.

The company recently unveiled its first products, and they’re slated to ship sometime next summer. Here’s how it works: two garments—a form-fitting long-sleeve shirt and a stretchy pair of workout pants—use EMG sensors to track muscle activity on 22 muscle groups. That activity gets passed to a wearable module called the Core which crunches the data and sends it wirelessly to a smartphone app.

There, users can see which muscle groups they’re using and how intensely they’re using them, in addition to tracking heart rate and breath. If you’re doing a bicep curl, for example, you could see that you were favoring your left arm over your right one. You could evaluate, at a glance, your level of exertion: Whether you were slacking off, bulking up, or on the verge of injuring yourself.

Ultimately, the aim is develop the app to a point where it can infer whether or not you’re using good form, too. If you were working on your arms, say, the app might alert you if it detected you were actually lifting with your back. The real promise of the data-driven approach is to give normal people a new degree of control over their work-outs across the board. Some women, Jayalath notes, avoid resistance training because they don’t when they’re going beyond toning to actually adding unwanted muscle. “Now we can quantifiably tell them,” he says.

Up until now, the team has been busy working out the technical side of the wearable sensors: Refining how they’re integrated and making sure the whole thing can be tossed in a washing machine at the end of the day. They’ve had help from former Facebook exec Chamath Palihapitiya, whose venture firm has supplied $3.5 million in funding. Following that the team added a neuroscientist from Stanford, a hardware exec from Leapfrog, and a mobile whiz from Facebook. Jayalath turned down a job offer from Apple along the way.

More recently, they’ve been faced with another challenge: turning this all into something the average person will wear. Fashion and comfort are paramount in any sort of wearable technology, and workout gear is no exception. “We’re very self conscious about how nice the product needs to be,” Jayalath says. “It has to break away from what people think of as electronics in clothing. We don’t want it to feel like an electric blanket.”

Athos will have to get all these parts right—comfort, fashion, and most importantly, real-world utility—if their gear is going to catch on. That last one might be the biggest question. How useful can you actually make this data? And will it do anything to address the greater problem of getting people motivated to go to the gym? After all, the point of that Rocky montage was that to get in serious ass-kicking shape, you don’t need computers or sensors, just grit and resolve. Plus, it won’t be cheap: the sensor-laden top and bottom are on pre-order for $99 each, with the Core priced at $199.

Still, whether or not you’re interested in quantifying your lats and traps, there’s something exciting about the approach Athos is taking here. We’ve seen all the cool things we can do with the sensors in our phones. We’re starting to see the possibilities afforded by putting sensors on our wrists. But wearables will get even more exciting when we can wear them all over.